April 11, 2000
New York Times
Pentagon-Congress Battle Is Hallmark of Doomed Craft's Past
By TIM WEINER
WASHINGTON, April 10 -- The V-22 Osprey is a classic case of a military program that would not be stopped.
The crash of an Osprey on Saturday night in Arizona, which killed 19 marines, came after years of arguments inside the Pentagon against building the aircraft, and years of dogged efforts by Congress to protect the $37 billion program.
The military began flying the first five Ospreys six months ago despite questions about the safety and cost of the aircraft, a hybrid designed to take off and land like a helicopter but cruise like an airplane.
After Saturday's crash, the Pentagon did not ground the Ospreys but said they would not fly until it understands what went wrong.
Senior Defense Department officials tried to cancel the program 11 years ago: too expensive, too experimental, they said. Congress refused. For four years running, Pentagon officials fought Congress, trying to stop the Osprey.
In 1992, Navy Secretary Sean O'Keefe told the House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon would not spend $790 million authorized by Congress to build three test aircraft. "The V-22 cannot be built to meet the requirements specified," Mr. O'Keefe said. "It's an engineering impossibility."
But Congress again defied the Defense Department, proclaiming the aircraft to be a potential technological wonder before tests had validated that claim.
"The technology was a revolutionary concept that lit the imagination of lawmakers, and the contractors fueled that fire," Mr. O'Keefe said in an interview today.
Marine commanders wanted it badly. They had developed no other alternative to replace the Vietnam-era Chinook helicopter, and they argued that Marine missions could not be adequately served by even the newest Army helicopter.
Members of Congress said the V-22 had great commercial potential. And the contracts represented hundreds of high-tech jobs across the country. Key Congressmen, some of them ex-marines, dug in their heels.
Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and the staunchest advocate of the V-22, today dismissed criticism of the aircraft with a barnyard epithet.
"Those who would come out now and question the program, they don't know what they're talking about," Mr. Weldon said in an interview. "If there is a technological problem, which I highly doubt, let's look at that."
Bert Cooper, a longtime congressional aide specializing in military aviation who retired last month, said of previous crashes of test aircraft, "two crashes do not tell us anything" yet about the aircraft. They are to be expected in testing a new military system like the Osprey, he said.
It could take months to determine whether the crash on Saturday was caused by a design defect, a manufacturing flaw or human error.
The Osprey's mission is to transport 20 to 24 fully armed marines, a larger number than can be carried by most military helicopters, in and out of combat and on rescue missions. Marines often ferry from ship to shore, and the corps argued for the Osprey because it could fly farther and faster than a helicopter, but still land in hot spots without the luxury of a runway.
It has been in development for 18 years; its cost has grown dramatically over time, partially due to the long fight over moving the aircraft from the drawing board to the assembly line. Government agencies outside the Pentagon place the cost today as high as $60 million apiece. That raises doubts about its commercial potential.
Five have been delivered to the Marines. Two test aircraft crashed; one of those accidents, in 1992, killed seven men.
"We're confident in the program because of the amount of testing we've done and the number of hours we've flown it," said Maj. Dave LaPan, a Marine Corps spokesman. "We've really put this aircraft through its paces."
Ever since the Pentagon bowed to Congress and agreed to build the aircraft, some of its officials, along with auditors from the General Accounting Office, have warned that the Osprey's testing was unrealistic.
In 1994, the G.A.O. reported that the aircraft's major elements "remain inadequate or untested."
That year, the Pentagon's inspector general said the aircraft had gone into development "without proper authorization" and without "formal review," the result, in part, of "highly unusual political factors."
In 1997, the Pentagon said the aircraft's prototypes could not yet carry passengers or hover over unprepared landing zones. The Defense Department also criticized the tests the aircraft was put through as "extremely artificial."
In 1998, the accounting office concluded that "after 15 years of development effort, the V-22 design has not been stabilized."
But no one ever developed an alternative aircraft. And its potential, Marine commanders said, was too good to pass up.
The aircraft's prime contractors, the Boeing Company's helicopter division, in Ridley Park, Pa., and Bell Helicopter Textron of Fort Worth, carpeted Congress with data showing that the V-22 would work wonders -- and that parts of it would be built in 40 states.
They convinced a majority of members of Congress. And the pressure from Congress to forge ahead never stopped. The supporters included the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats.
No one fought harder than Mr. Weldon, who represents the Pennsylvania district that includes Boeing's helicopter division.
"We had a coalition that was broad and deep," Mr. Weldon said today. "We had the ex-marines in Congress. We brought in the retired Marine reserve officers' association. I brought in the United Auto Workers and the civil aviation people."
Mr. Cooper, the aviation expert, added, "It does have range and speed advantages. But is it worth it?"
Perhaps not, said Mr. O'Keefe, the former Navy secretary, now the Bantle professor of business and government at Syracuse University. The futuristic technology may not mesh with its more mundane mission, he said. "It's a bus to bring 20 people from ship to shore."
The "revolutionary concept" of the Osprey entranced Congress, but has proven hard to realize, he said.
"This was within the realm of the believable," Mr. O'Keefe said. "But all the work that was needed to be done, to this day, it hasn't been accomplished. This was something that required a little more than pressing the envelope of technology."
April 11, 2000
The Plane That Nobody Wanted
By LAWRENCE J. KORB
Grounding the remaining 12 V-22 Osprey airplanes, after the crash that killed 19 Marines this weekend, is only the beginning of what the Pentagon and Congress should do. Immediately, the government should stop new production of any more new Ospreys. This plane should never have been built; three of the 15 that have been delivered so far have already been lost in crashes.
The Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane, was conceived two decades ago, at the height of the cold war, as a joint Army-Marine Corps plane. In the 80's and 90's, high-level officials from the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations all recommended cancelling it. Their objections, which have been echoed by the General Accounting Office, were that the V-22 is too expensive and too technologically troubled.
Present plans call for building 458 Ospreys for $37.3 billion, or more than $80 million apiece for a plane that carries just 24 Marines. This is twice as much as an F-16 fighter plane and about the same as the projected cost of another new plane, the joint strike fighter.
The original recommendation to cancel the Osprey was in 1986, when the Pentagon budget was 40 percent higher than it is now and the cost of a single V-22 was estimated at $24 million, with 923 aircraft to be built.
The project was actually cancelled in 1989 by the Bush administration -- by that time the unit cost had risen to $35 million, with 602 planes to be built, and the Army had dropped out of the program. But Congress, concerned about the loss of 125,000 jobs, kept the V-22 alive. Then, in the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton championed it, offering the rather farfetched reasoning that it would have not only military value but also commercial applications, notably as a solution to traffic congestion in larger cities. In the waning days of the 1992 election, President Bush, in a desperate attempt to win Texas, also changed his mind about the plane.
Once in office, President Clinton endorsed building the plane even though his deputy secretary of defense, John Deutch, had recommended cancelling it and the commercial sector had withdrawn from the project.
Even if the program were cancelled, the Marine Corps could still get some return for the tens of billions of dollars invested by fielding the existing V-22's to develop innovative tactics. This is what the Air Force did with the one squadron of B-2 bombers that was built before that wasteful program was scrapped. As for transporting soldiers and equipment, the Marines could buy Army Blackhawk helicopters at one-sixth the cost of Ospreys.
Cancelling the V-22 now would also free up money for more critical uses. General James Jones, the Marine Corps commandant, has said that despite the $30 billion rise in the defense budget in the last two years, this year the Marines are short $1.4 billion for improving pay and conditions for personnel, , modernizing repair shops, and maintaining and improving equipment. Cancelling the V-22 in the 2001 budget would more than pay for those items. Cutting the V-22 would also help the Pentagon deal with a coming threat to its aircraft budget as $400 billion in other planned new airplanes begins to come due.
Stopping the Osprey before it goes any further would also be in keeping with the sensible argument (espoused by George W. Bush among others) that with the end of the cold war, the United States should skip a generation of producing new aircraft and put the money into research. The country can do better for its money than it is doing with the Osprey.
Lawrence J. Korb, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.
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